GLIMPSE issue 7 explores the evolution of written
language, from its earliest appearance to its current
and unique forms. Contributors to this issue consider
visual implications of text in multiple contexts and
functions, explicit and subtle.

Georgia B. Barnhill
has been at the American
Antiquarian Society since
the fall of 1968 and was
the curator of the graphic
arts department from
1969 to 2009. During
those many years, she
lectured and published
extensively on aspects of
the Societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s print and illustrated book collections
for audiences in the US
and abroad. Among her
recent accomplishments
is a definitive descriptive
bibliography of books
and articles on American
prints of the 18th and 19th
centuries. As director of
the Center for Historic
American Visual Culture,
she places the demystification of images for
historians and others at
the center of a number of
activities.

9

Donald Thomas Burgy
is the only child of Helen
Stebler and Lucien Burgy
who fled World War I from
Alsace to New York. He
was born in Manhattan in
1937. His first one-man
art exhibition was at age
eight. Joy Renjilian of
Holyoke, Massachusetts
and he married in 1966.
Their twin sons, Lucien
Boston Sky and Sarkis
Boston Sky, were born in
1974. Burgy has taught
art in Chicopee, Mass.,
Rutgers University,
Brentwood, N.Y., Bradford
Junior College, Harvard

University, Milton Academy
and Massachusetts College
of Art. Critics describe his
work as Conceptual Art.
He exhibited in Information (1970) at the Museum
of Modern Art, which was
a survey of concept art.
Recently he completed a
series of forty works of art
that translate engravings
by earliest humans, 30,000
to 10,000 years ago.
The work reproduced in
GLIMPSE is the first in the
series.

42

Robert Correia, Jr. is an
amateur photographer and
outdoor enthusiast, who delights in all manner of nonmotorized exploration. Rob
has acquired over 20 years
of financial management
experience, by education
and employment at Ocean
Spray Cranberries, Inc., a
Fortune 500 grower-owned
cooperative, and most
recently at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
His interest in public service
has lead to appointments
as a volunteer firefighter,
a relief worker for FEMA
following hurricane Katrina,
and a Sierra Club backpacking trip leader. He lives in
a bungalow in the woods
of southeastern Massachusetts.

42

Dr. Christine McCarthy
Madsen is a librarian and
academic whose research
aims to re-center libraries at

the heart of all the disciplines,
and re-focus the work of
librarians on creating a space
for the transformation of
information into knowledge.
Her dissertation project was a
critical analysis of the impact
of digitization on scholarship
and practice in the Tibetan
and Himalayan region, but her
larger research agenda is to
recapture an integrated space
in and from which to study
the future of libraries. Madsen
just completed her Doctorate
degree at the Oxford Internet
Institute of the University of
Oxford.

54

Megan Michalak is an
interdisciplinary artist
whose studio practice spans
sculpture, new media,
performance and drawing.
She lives in New York state
where she is an assistant
professor at State University
of New York (SUNY), Buffalo. Her works have been
exhibited internationally at
the Moscow Biennale for
Young Art, Galleria Titanik
in Finland, Fonds Regional
dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Art Contemporain in
Montpelier France, and
the Bronx Museum of
the Arts, among others.
Interviews with the artist
have appeared on the YLE
Television National News
of Finland, and YLE Radio
Turku. Michalak received
an MFA in Sculpture from
Bard College, and an MFA
in Studio for Interrelated
Media from the Massachusetts College of Art.

34

Dr. Matthew H. Schneps
studied calligraphy as a
child in Japan, and thanks
to his father who was
head of design at a major
publishing house, grew up
in a home surrounded by
typography. Schneps has a
PhD in Physics from MIT, and
is an astrophysicist at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics (CfA).
There, he was co-Director of
the Wolbach Image Processing Laboratory, and founding director of the Science
Media Group, where he
creates television and other
visual media. He is founding
director of the Laboratory
for Visual Learning, conducting research in the neuroscience of visual perception
and learning.

Juliet Shen was born and
raised in New York and now
lives in Seattle, Washington,
where she has an independent design firm and
teaches typography at the
School of Visual Concepts.
In 2005–2006 she closed
her doors for one year and
moved to England to earn a
master’s degree in typeface
design at the University of
Reading. Her typefaces include Bullen (Font Bureau),
inspired by early American
foundry type; Earlybird (Oxford University Press), for
primary level readers; and
Lushootseed School (Tulalip
Tribes of Washington), a
Native American font. She
has a special interest in
American type history and
recently organized the first
Type Americana conference
in Seattle. She is a sometimes letterpress printer
and a dedicated student of
tai chi.

69

Dr. André Skupin is
an associate professor
of Geography at San
Diego State University.
He received a master’s
degree in Cartography at
the Technical University
Dresden, Germany, and a
PhD in Geography at the
State University of New
York (SUNY), Buffalo. Dr.
Skupin’s core research area
involves leveraging geographic metaphors, cartographic principles, and
computational techniques
towards the visualization

of high-dimensional data. He
has developed new visual
data mining approaches for
diverse data sources, from
large text document collections to crime statistics
and environmental sensor
data. His research is strongly
interdisciplinary, aimed
especially at increased crossfertilization between geography, information science, and
computer science.

80

Ryan Sullivan has been
drawing since he developed
thumbs in the womb. After
being yelled at for obsessively doodling during class for
the better part of 12 years,
he enrolled in the Illustration
program at the University of
Massachusetts in Dartmouth
and graduated in 2008.
Though he tends toward
creating comics, primarily about crows that smoke
butts, he is also available for
copious amounts of freelance
work. He currently lives in
Weymouth, Massachusetts
with his fiancée, Rachel, and
an ungrateful Boston Terrier
named Nickels.

Text

30

20

issue 7

Dr. Matthew Reed has been
an imaging scientist for over
twenty years and specializes
in image analysis, quantitative
microscopy and stereology. He has cofounded two
companies, QuanToxPath
Ltd and Spiral Scratch Ltd,
and is a visiting professor at
the University of Ulster, UK.
Matt recently re-designed,
re-typeset and reprinted
the stereology handbook
he coauthored with Vyvyan
Howard in 1998. The book is
still selling well, is used in numerous training courses and
has more than 900 academic
citations. Matt lives in West
Kirby, on the northwest coast
of the UK, with his wife Dawn,
daughter Lorna and son Ben.

GLIMPSE issue #7, Text, presents artists’, designers’, historians’, visual scientists’
and geographers’ engagements with the prehistoric roots of, and aesthetic, cognitive, social, religious, and political engagements with the visual language and
visual evidence of text. We start with Donald Thomas Burgy’s radical concept art
illustrating earliest written language as visually-rooted in representations of spinning and weaving, and in early visual metaphors for the cycle of life. Next, we
leap forward 28-40 millennia to typographer Juliet Shen’s recent efforts to help
preserve the Lushootseed language by designing a font that emulates the spirit
of the Tulalip Tribes’ culture, art, and spoken language. Astrophysicist Dr.
Matthew Schneps then shares his understanding of written language as evolving
within the constraints of human kinesthetics, and his research on the exceptional
perceptual abilities of scientists and students with dyslexia. Dr. Schneps explains
why people with dyslexia may be particularly suited to the profession of
typography.
Visual scientist Dr. Matthew Reed treats us to an essay on the structure of text,
drawing comparisons of storage density between cortex and codex. GLIMPSE’s
Dr. Christine McCarthy Madsen and photographer Robert Correia, Jr. share their
article and stunning photo essay on Tibetan Buddhist beliefs in the power of the
motion-activation of textual prayers and how this is translated in the digital-era
Tibetan diaspora. Visual artist Megan Michalak laboriously mines The New York
Times, bringing an archaeological mind-set to current events and the artifact of
the newspaper.
Geographer André Skupin segues into GLIMPSE issue 8 on the theme of cartography, with an essay on the role of text in maps. Historian and curator, Georgia
B. Barnhill contextualizes a handwritten portrait of Abraham Lincoln. This issue is
further punctuated with cinephile Ivy Moylan’s review of Peter Greenaway’s
Prospero’s Books (1997), and Rachel Sapin’s short pieces on forms and relics of
text, including skywriting. Finally, we close this issue with illustrator Ryan “Sully”
Sullivan’s exclamatory exercise of punctuation.

GLIMPSE is an independent, interdisciplinary journal that examines the functions,
processes and effects of vision and its implications for being, knowing and constructing our world(s). Each theme-focused issue
features articles, visual essays, interviews
and reviews spanning the physical sciences,
social sciences, arts and humanities.

ERRATA In GLIMPSE issue 6 “Invisible Friends: The
creation of imaginary companions in childhood
and beyond,” by Tracy Gleason: Selected print
copies contained a production error which
cropped the caption for the illustration on pages
10-11. The caption should have appeared as ‘(Left)
“Snuggle Bear,” is a charming stuffed brown bear
animated and loved by a 4-year-old boy. Although
Snuggle Bear’s owner is his daddy, they are also
close friends and have been for years. When the
little boy plays firefighter, Snuggle Bear likes to
be his fire dog.’

This issue leaves me with much to ponder, and with more questions about text
than with which I started: Burgy’s piece leaves me interested in more cross-disciplinary, deeply-considered connections for how earliest written language might
have evolved. Further, what will the future of text and reading look like? How will
text be transmitted across centuries and millennia in a digital future? What are
other examples of belief and practice of the “activation” of text? We welcome
your comments to these and other questions elicited in the following pages.

Here we read an engraved stone found in Gรถnnersdorf, a hunter/
gatherer winter dwelling on a terrace overlooking the Rhine River. The
site is dated to Magdalenian V culture of the late Bรถlling temperate
climate ca. 12,500 years BC. The reading is based upon a drawing of
the engraving by Gisela Fischer and our illustration is a detail of her
drawing.

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

10

Three females are depicted in profile silhouette facing right. The
sizes and shapes of their buttocks and breasts represent, when
viewed from left to right, those of an old crone, a matron, and a
maiden carrying her child papoose style with her teenage daughter
before her. They are on a journey with the youngest walking ahead
and oldest behind.

Text

The twist signs are comprised of two lines converging into one. Their
shapes resemble the letter Y. They represent a spinsterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s process of
twisting fibers together to make strands by rolling them along her
hip or thigh with the fingers of her right hand. Each female figureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
twist sign is engraved on her right hip.

issue 7

Engraved within the three female silhouettes are abstract signs which
identify them as spinsters who twist fibers into strands of thread,
string, yarn, lamp wicks, cords, etc.

11

As the three spinsters work together, they specialize in the chain of
operations and this is signified by variations in the shape and size of
their hip twists. The maiden’s twist is small and comprised of finely
incised lines signifying simple short strands she twists at the process’
beginning. The matron’s is deeply incised long lines signifying longer
stronger strands resulting from twisting together the maiden’s
products.

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

12

In earliest Germanic legend, three ladies known as the Norns sit
spinning strands by a spring beneath three roots of Yggdrasil, the
world tree of all life. Old Urth, middle age Verdandi, and young Skuld
preside over the fate of all gods and humans. They spin the threads
of our lives and set their spans. Urth represents fate decreed at birth.
Verdandi (to become) represents one’s life on Earth. Skuld (something
owed) represents death, the debt all must pay.
The three Norns weave the web of fate, fastening the threads of
destiny. Urth and Verdandi, what was and is, stretch the web from
East to West, from dawn to dusk, and Skuld, what shall be, cuts it.
The three females represented in the Gönnersdorf engraving are the
progenitors of the Norns and the Moirai of Greek myth: Klotho (twister,
spinner), who spins the thread of life; Lachasis (allotment, share,
portion), who measures it out to receive one’s due; and Anthropos
(unturnable, inflexible, unchangeable) chooses when to cut it.

The three females are the source of the Fates of Roman myth who
preside over birth, the Parcae (parere, to bear children): Nona (nonus,
a ninth, a mature birth), Decima (decimus, a tenth, a postmature
birth), and Morta (death, a still birth).

The Gönnersdorf engraving’s twist signs are writing. They are one
example of the Paleolithic mother script which descended over millennia
to become part of daughter writing systems in post-glacial civilizations.

Text

The Gönnersdorf spinsters’ names are unknown so we will refer to
them as the Norns: Urth, Verdandi, and Skuld. Skuld presides over
the future rearing her child and teenage daughter who walks before
her. They are ahead of the others walking to the right, in the direction
of the future. Old Urth at the left carries a silhouette of a man who
died in the past. His empty silhouette identifies his non-existence
and his position behind her signifies that he is in the past.

issue 7

The three Gönnersdorf spinsters are Fates presiding over past,
present, and future. They are spinning substance, turning it into
becoming, being and has been. They spin, measure and cut the
thread of life’s time.

13

In ancient Egypt a hieroglyph of two parallel twists represents warp
threads signifying fringed fabric, item of clothing. A triplet of twisted
lamp wicks signifies greatest time, infinite time. A cord with a triplet
of knots signifies to plan, to found.

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GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

Y

14

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Various twist signs are written in LinearaB script on a clay tablet found
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Verdandi’s inverted hip twist
is an unfinished strand. Urth’s Y is
htt
finished. The Minoan inverted twists signify unfinished strands.

In the following Chinese characters, twist signs signifying textile, time
and/or life are identical to Paleolithic twists in form and meaning
with the addition of circular representations of silk worm cocoons to
identify the thread as silk.
Ti is a thread wound on a spool with a winch at the bottom: succession
of brothers. Kuan is two parallel twists of silk warp threads: to weave,
to join, to fix. Sun is a human figure with a twist of silk thread: a
connecting line of offspring, a grandson, posterity.

l

of the Gönnersdorf engraving are typical of Magdalenian art which
persisted throughout Europe from the Würm IV glacial maximum ca.
16,000 years BC to its end during the warm Alleröd climate ca. 10,000
years BC. The signs and images of Magdalenian art are descended
almost unchanged from Solutrean, Gravettian and Aurignacian artistic
traditions that preceded them.

A 17-inch-high female figure sculpted in relief was found in Abri Laussel, a rock shelter
overlooking the River Beune, a tributary of the VĂŠzĂ¨re in France. It is dated to the
Gravettian culture during the warm moist Tursac Interstadial ca. 23,000 years BC. She
raises a bison horn incised with 13 lines to signify 13 months of a lunar year. A twist
sign engraved on her right hip identifies her as a spinster. The spinster who holds up
a calendric of the year is a Fate of time, the Norn who spins the thread of life and
presides over destiny.

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p
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ht

At present, the earliest known example of the art of painting is a wall mural in Chauvet
cave in France which is dated ca. 30,400 years BC. It is an example of earliest Aurignacian
culture in Europe. Reproduced here is a detail of the Chauvet mural.
Three parallel vertical bands of four animal images are arranged in calendric sequences.
In a band of four horses a Przwalski horse is at the bandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bottom. It is a breed adapted
to cold climate with its small body and short nose. It migrated into the region only in
winter. At the bandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s top is a summer horse with large body and long nose.

In the center calendric band’s bottom are two rhinoceros in a tête-à-tête confrontation,
a scene typical of the late autumn rut. It is the time when rhinos have grown their woolly
winter coats. The large twist sign written on one rhino labels it as an excellent source
of wool for twisting. A longer twist written beside the Przwalski horse represents a
spinster who is a Norn overseeing the winter horse’s fate. She is a Fate of time and
life presiding over a calendar of the four seasons as signified by fauna that migrate
in and out of the region in chronological sequence annually.
Twist signs are written to modify the meanings of images in the earliest painting.
Abstract writing and representational images are seamlessly together in the earliest
painting. Writing is as old as art. The twist signs in the Chauvet painting, Gönnersdorf
engraving and Chinese characters are evidence of an unbroken continuity from
earliest Aurignacian culture in Europe to modern Asia. The many engraved stones
paving the floor around Gönnersdorf’s hearth are a great library. Their widespread
distribution over the floor suggests widespread literacy and open access. w

The artist thanks the librarians of the Tozzer Library, Harvard University.

Prospero’s Books

(RE)VIEW

Directed by Peter Greenaway, 1991. 124 minutes.
by Ivy Moylan

P

rospero’s Books is Peter Greenaway’s
cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s
The Tempest, starring John Gielgud. It
is a heady and hallucinatory film with
image, text, dialogue and sound overlaying each
other. Although it loosely follows the play’s
plot, that of an exiled magician whose daughter
falls in love with his enemy’s son, it is more a
re-interpretation of The Tempest than a direct
adaptation.

Prospero’s Books was Greenaway’s follow-up film
to The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,
which was an internationally-acclaimed art film.
With Prospero’s Books, Greenaway was one of the
first filmmakers to use HDTV technology to create
the picture within the picture elements.

issue 7

When the film was released in 1991, it was poorly
received. There were angry reactions: there was
too much going on in the frame; it wasn’t really an
adaptation; it didn’t make any sense; there wasn’t
any story. Some admired it, but few enjoyed it.
However, now, nearly 20 years later, it appears
to have been far ahead of its time. Greenaway’s
multilayering of narrative forms foretold the
media inundation and multi-tasking life that is
normal to us now. w

An artifact containing some of the earliest forms of written language, the Rosetta Stone
dates back to 196 BC and the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt. The content of the text is a decree
that affirms the royal cult of 13-year old Ptolemy V on the anniversary of his coronation.
The decree is carved into the stone three times in three different languages: hieroglyphics
(a language used by priests), demotic (the quotidian language used by the general public),
and Greek (the language used by royalty and administrative figures). - Rachel Sapin

19

Rosetta Stone

Y

ou may have heard the term Rosetta Stone used figuratively as something that
provides the key to understanding a concept that is otherwise mysterious. That’s
because the “discovery” of the Rosetta Stone by soldiers in Napoleon’s army in 1799,
and the ensuing analysis of the artifact by thousands of scholars contributed immensely
to our current understanding of Egyptian culture and the deciphering of hieroglyphics, a
writing form that had gone out of use after the end of the fourth century.

Text

The film’s title refers to 24 books that Prospero
took with him to his island exile–volumes he
values more than his dukedom. Greenaway
imagines what these books are, introducing
them throughout the film, and presents
Shakespeare’s narrative as another story that
Prospero is writing. Prospero is author, central
character and producer of the film’s action. We
see him writing at his desk, putting down the
words that he is also narrating to us. And, we
see him perform the actions that he is writing
and narrating. Each part overlays the next to

add another dimension to the action. By interlacing
the elements of text, image and action Greenaway
pushes beyond the normal boundaries of the film
frame, traditional narrative, and the cinematic
medium.

This past June, I sat among 350 linguists and educators
in Eugene, Oregon, and listened to a keynote
address by one of the last surviving native speakers
of her Athabascan language. The Northwest Indian
Language Institute at the University of Oregon hosted
the Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium,
which I attended to speak about aesthetic innovation
in the design of Native American typefaces. Innovation
is needed to give indigenous typefaces a stronger
cultural identity, since the Latin typographic design
tradition, which originated in Europe, is not historically
germane to the culture of Native American peoples.
Both the small stroke terminals that we call serifs and
the relative position of thick and thin strokes on the
letters themselves are beholden to the broad-nib pen,
the predominant tool of scribes in the 15th century
when the technology of printing from cast metal type
literally solidified the appearance of the prototypical
roman typeface we are accustomed to reading. Its
appearance has changed very little over the centuries
since then.
Today, design innovations in typefaces made for
reading are necessarily subtle and difficult to perceive
without a trained eye because too much innovation
diverts the readerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attention from the content of the
text to its appearance. This reigning conservatism
was abetted by the large capital investment required
of printers while typesetting remained within their
exclusive purview. But so long as principles of legibility
are observed, orthodoxy in typeface design is less
relevant in cases where literacy has been imposed
so recently upon an oral tradition, as is the case with
most American indigenous languages. Although the
more recent designs of text typefaces without serifs

(sans serif) may offer a more neutral
springboard from which to design
new Native American fonts, raising
the cultural and aesthetic appeal
of these fonts calls for more than
neutrality.
Most Native American languages had
no written script until the late 20th
century, when linguists began recording
the stories, songs and everyday
speech of elderly native speakers. (This
movement came too late for many
indigenous languages, after a century
of public policy attempted to stamp
them out.) Today most of the extant
indigenous languages in the U.S. are
written in the Latin alphabet amplified
by diacritical accents and phonetic
characters, a system of writing devised
by linguists. Unlike the typography of the
traditional Latin alphabet, these scripts
do not form a harmonious interwoven
texture on the page. The idea that
indigenous fonts should be aesthetic as
well as functional, that they should look
as balanced as Latin text on the page,
has not yet taken root among linguists
and educators, concentrated as they are
on capturing and analyzing the speech
of elders while itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s still possible, and on
finding effective ways to teach fluency to
second-language learners. Typographic
aesthetics are just not on their radar. As
a result, the appearance of most devised

(This page) Lushootseed wood type
created by the Hamilton Museum of
Wood Type & Printing, Two Rivers,
Wisconsin. The press was used at the
2010 Tulalip Lushootseed Language
Camp in Washington. Image courtesy of
The Tulalip Tribes of Washington.

writing systems for indigenous languages is
more likely to intimidate youthful learners
than invite them to decode the mysteries of
the script.

Typographic needs
of indigenous language fonts

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

22

Currently, the need for typefaces with
indigenous language characters is sometimes
met through the illegal but still common
practice of opening “free” fonts and editing
them to add the missing characters. Most
of the so-called “free” fonts are bundled
with operating systems and office software
programs and have licensing agreements
that prohibit editing and redistribution. A
better way to obtain typefaces for indigenous
language characters is to use fonts with
extensive character sets that seek to meet
the needs of any and all such scripts. But
because of the sheer volume of characters
contained in these pan-indigenous fonts
(numbering in the thousands) and the tiny size
of some indigenous language communities,
not all scripts are well served by these sets,
and may call for a customized font instead
(Figure 1).

(Figure 1) Note the poor default display of the two
comma accents, one above the c-caron (c-wedge) and
one belonging to the el, in this extended unicode font.

The Tulalip Tribes commissioned me to custom
design a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font for
Lushootseed, a member of the Salish family of
languages. The United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
ranks Lushootseed as critically endangered,
the final status before extinction (Figure 2). We
named the new font “Lushootseed School”
since its primary purpose was as a tool for
teaching children.

On the Tulalip reservation, a 20,000-acre area on the
Salish Sea about 40 miles north of Seattle, Lushootseed
instruction begins at the preschool level. The teachers
in the Tulalip Lushootseed Department explained
to me that children laboriously copied the serifs on
some letters when a font like Times Roman was used
in pedagogic materials. Though research with young
readers has found no advantage to using sans serif
fonts, educators still prefer them when teaching
reading and writing simultaneously.

Designing a Lushootseed font
Lushootseed is indigenous to the place where it once
thrived, spoken by peoples who revered the natural
world that sustained them. The sound of it blends into
the natural sounds of the Pacific Northwest: water
lapping on the shore, wind rustling through cedar
trees, the consonantal clicking of creatures in the wild.
At our very first meeting, a master teacher pointed
out to me that the written script did not do justice
to the spoken language. I went home and listened
to recordings of elders telling traditional stories,
and made it my design brief to produce a typeface
that looked as graceful on the page as the language
sounded.
There are some tasks that must precede the design
of glyphs for an indigenous language font. Unicode
compliance means that the font follows international
encoding standards, ensuring that one may change the

How font software works

key

unicode for the
character “scaron”

font-specific
glyph outline

0161

š

visible glyph

After the encoding for Lushootseed School was agreed upon, I
studied traditional Salish art forms, benefiting from the fortuitous
presence of a Salish art exhibit named S’abadeb, The Gifts, at

Text

font of a document without affecting its actual text (Figure 3).
Fonts with Unicode private use area (PUA) or incorrect encoding
produce documents that can only be read in the font with which
they were created. This impedes the exchange of information
among academics, for example, who may not have the same
font installed on their computers. It also creates headaches
for archivists since the digital documents are unreadable if the
original fonts are lost. So the first step in designing a font for
an indigenous language is to determine the standard Unicode
for its characters. Sometimes similar-looking glyphs are linked
to different Unicodes. For example, the el-caron (Unicode
013E) that is used in central European languages is rendered
as the letter el followed by an apostrophe-like accent and looks
identical to the glottalized el (Unicode 0063 + Unicode 0315)
in Lushootseed. Selection of the right code for a particular
language requires consulting with speakers and linguists and
then applying the standard consistently in all subsequently
designed fonts.

the Seattle Art Museum. I hoped to discover
authentic forms that could be used in the
font design. I found that the symmetry of
Salish art does not fit the rigid geometry of
the digital environment. It is the symmetry of
nature, where lines curve and there are no
true circles. In Salish objects, generosity in
volume is favored over elongation, so that
conical baskets have convex sides and
circular shapes are always wider in the
middle. Most strikingly, the persistent
repetition of certain formal motifs, the
reduction and simplification of shapes, and a
heightened awareness of the interaction
between the interior space of a shape and
the exterior space defined by its perimeter—
all these attributes of Salish art are mirrored
in the way typeface designers see letter
forms (Figures 4-9).

Designing in the spirit of wood

24

Next, I considered how to incorporate the
influence of traditional Salish art in the
Lushootseed typeface. Metal typecasting was
a technology well suited to reproducing thin

parts of a stroke that withstood the
pressure of the printing platen, and
broad areas that inked evenly, all in
the same small letter. It faithfully
reproduced the sharp edges of the
pen stroke and the small serifs. But
traditional Salish art and artifacts
are infused with the spirit of wood.
Objects sculpted of wood have
softer edges and broader details.
To preserve the spirit of wood in
Lushootseed School, I avoided the
true straight edge that is the natural
extension of the digital pixel and
made straight strokes with slightly
curved edges and terminals. The
basic round unit in the typeface is
broader across than it is tall. Stroke

ʔ
intersections, such as the center name, running man (see the final
a
of the x, are rounded instead of character in Figure 11), than the
pointed (Figures 10 and 11).
typical typeset Greek lambda. One
b b̓
character in particular proved to
c
be controversial. Among the three
Improving the texture of
crossed el characters in Unicode,
Lushootseed on the page
d dᶻ
the correct linguistic choice for the
The typography of Lushootseed in Tulalip Tribes’ font is one with a
ə
continuous text suffers most from looped belt, but the teachers cong
the frequent use of characters sidered this letter awkward to write
incorporating a raised small w, and too similar to an ampersand.
h
which modifies the pronunciation of They had their own way of writing
i
the letter immediately preceding it. the character as a cursive looped
The spaces under the raised small el with a bar across the intersecǰ
w leave disturbing holes in the tion. With any script for a major
of words. For Lushootseed world language, such an anomaly
k k̓ kʷ k̓ʷ middle
l the
School, this glyph is based on the would not be incorporated into
m
t
l
handwritten, or informal form. The typeface, but for endangered
lanT as Lushootseed,
h small
.
rounded vertices of the informal guages
N
e
such
E teaching
ƛ̕
ib communities
w capture more white space indigenous
T
r
c
N
within the letter, allowing it to be are all that
s stand between survival
m
O extinction.
b
reduced in size without fillingCin. andu
preferences
s trump Their
Y
n n̓
/
Reducing the size in turnLreduces
should
standard typoNmiddleoofmgraphic usage and they should be
the unsightly gaps in the
p
O
words (Figure 12).
l.c permitted to develop distinctive
N
a
q q̓ qʷ q̓ʷ
O
styles, just as the European
I theuspace
rn above glyphic
T
In Lushootseed
scribes
did
in the centuries before
P
I
o
s
theRx-height,ejthe area where the Latin alphabet was cast as type
C withpsascenders like h poke (Figure 14).
Sletters
t t̕
B
also accommodate two
im
lmust
SU up,
u
levels
of diacritical accents. This (Figure 14) The three els below each have
g
.
wleaves too shallow an area below a distinct unicode. The Tulalip Lushootseed
w
w
for letters such as s, k and x that community uses the character on the right,
w
/
have
mid-section subdivisions. This
/
:
xʷ p
difficulty was solved by abandoning
t
x̌ʷ
x̌ht
the traditional four-line grid of the
Latin alphabet and adding a second but the teachers dislike it and requested a
y
x-height (Figure 13).
design based on handwriting (below, left) for

(Figure 10, above) Lushootseed
alphabet tree with core characters and
their diacritical branches. There are no
capital letters, allowing all characters
to fit on the keyboard with use of the
shift key. Image courtesy of the author.
(Figure 11, right) Enlarged characters
showing the rounded intersections and
slightly curved strokes and terminals.
Image courtesy of the author.

Additional characters in Lushootseed School have an unorthodox
design. The glottalized stroked
lambda looks more like its popular

the Lushootseed School font. An alternate
font called Lushootseed Sulad with the
standard glyph (right), was also made.

The same text set in Lushootseed School (center) and two
other fonts available to the Tulalip Tribes’ language teachers.
Excerpt from “The Legend of the Boy Who Could Not Walk,”
as narrated by Emma Conrad (Sauk-Suiattle).

(Figure 12, left above) The
same text set in Lushootseed
School (center) and two other
fonts available to the Tulalip
Tribes’ language teachers.
Excerpt from “The Legend
of the Boy Who Could Not
Walk,” as narrated by Emma
Conrad (Sauk-Suiattle).
Image courtesy of the author.
(Figure 13, left below)
The Lushootseed font was
adapted to a 6-line grid with
two lowercase x-heights and
two tiers of diacritic accents.
Image courtesy of the author.

Observations on designing for a different culture
Working for the Tulalip Tribes proved to be different
from designing for any other client in my 30 years of
professional practice. As mentioned, the communityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
preferences were a large factor in decisions that would
customarily be based solely on established typographic
norms. On a deeper level, there were cultural differences
in communication. Designers usually receive important
feedback about the direction of their work in face-to-face
meetings, even if it means reading between the lines or
identifying a decision-making hierarchy within the group.
In this community, etiquette did not permit expressions
of open praise or criticism, and the social structure of the
group remained opaque, so these avenues for gaining
insight were closed. I had to adjust my expectations and
be patient.

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

28

NT ib
E
NT bscr
O
To the indigenous language community, I offer these
C su
Y
recommendations for working with a typeface designer:
1)
L and m/
N
that a tech-savvy point person liaise with the designer
o
-Osoftware;
c
be available to test and troubleshoot the font
.
l
N
a all
2) that the approval process includeIconsultation
with
O
n
r
T and
stakeholders, such as linguists, P
teachers,
utechnology
I
o
j
aides; and 3) that a flexible attitude
be
adopted
regarding
R point issimportant
e
C
keyboarding habits. This
latter
BS limp font permitsbecause
the use of a non U
Unicode-compliant
some
S that cannot
keyboarding habits
then
be
sustained
when
.g
switching to a Unicodew
font.
w
w
/
Pedagogical
:/ values of an aesthetic typeface
p
t
Endangered
ht Native American languages deserve harmonious, balanced typefaces that reflect something of their
indigenous aesthetic tradition. A typeface that appeals
to the eye and has a cultural connection to its speakers
will attract new learners to an indigenous language and
provide affirmative reinforcement of their effortsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;much
as a well designed and beautifully crafted tool will encourage the apprentice cabinetmaker to do fine joining.
This power should be exploited by indigenous language
communities in the uphill endeavor to save their language
from extinction by restoring it to everyday use. w

l

tm
h
.
e

Adding hand typesetting and printing to the
language acquisition stream can enhance
cognition for those who benefit from the
integration of kinetic activity with learning.
Using wood type modeled on the digital font
design, the Tulalip Tribes first combined a
printing workshop with language instruction
during their Language Camp in August, 2010.

(Figure 17, below) Showing off their
letterpress prints of the Lushootseed word,
â&#x20AC;&#x153;listen.â&#x20AC;? Image courtesy of the Tulalip Tribes
of Washington.

Text

(Figure 16, left) Students at Language
Camp print with their Lushootseed wood
type. Image courtesy of the Tulalip Tribes of
Washington.

issue 7

(Figure 15, far left) Lushootseed teacher
Rebecca Posey teaches students to print on
the 19th-century proofing press donated to
the Tulalip Tribes by Sandra Lyon, a retired
teacher. Image courtesy of the Tulalip Tribes
of Washington.

29

DYSLEXIA:
A mind for

typography

by Matthew H. Schneps, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

P

30

rior to the invention of movable type, books
were produced by talented scribes who painstakingly drew every page by hand. Though today hand-drawn text has been supplanted by modern
technology, the aesthetics of modern
typography is rooted in the aesthetics
of the pre-industrial calligraphers who
slowly and carefully drew text-forms by
hand. A moderate-sized book could
take years to reproduce. Therefore, an
important aspect of this aesthetic was
driven by a need to avoid disrupting the
natural flow of the hand, and minimize
the number of strokes required to render the text. Characters were designed
so that they could be smoothly linked
from one to the next, in shapes that were
easily executed by the muscles of the
hand and arm. The biological origins of
the modern typographic aesthetic are
now much-disguised; nonetheless, virtually every font
in use today incorporates designs that can be traced to
the constraints and limitations of human kinesthetics.

beauty. Just as some people have bodies
better suited to marathon running than to
weightlifting, abilities for fine motor control
and eye-hand coordination required for calligraphy vary tremendously
among individuals. Though
less obvious, people also
vary widely in their abilities
for perception. It is therefore
natural to assume that the
ability to perceive and appreciate the subtleties of typographic aesthetics also varies
according to the individual.

virtually
every font...
incorporates
designs
that can be
traced to the
constraints...
of human
kinesthetics

We often joke that physicians seem incapable of writing a legible prescription. And yet, others seem to be
gifted with handwriting remarkable for its grace and

We are aware that many
people wear eyeglasses to
correct for differences in the
structure of their eye that affects sensitivity to detail. Differences of this
sort, that make people more or less sensitive to the effect of fine detail, will obviously
alter their ability to appreciate things like
the role a serif has on the qualities of a font.
While such obvious differences in vision are
easily measured and corrected, others that
originate deeper within the brain are more
subtle, but can nevertheless have profound
effects on a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sensitivity to typographic design.
Since the typographic aesthetic is rooted
in the subtleties of gesture and motion
produced by the hand, and since the ability
(Left) Arabic calligraphy, translates to
â&#x20AC;&#x153;The distant ports will not entice me.
Leave me to open seas, and salt-laden winds.â&#x20AC;?
- Nadeem Naimy

(Right) Research shows that people with
dyslexia are better able to remember
the physical layout and arrangements of
blurred images such as this, compared to
people who are typical readers. Blurring
the image enhances visual characteristics
better matched to the peripheral portions
of the visual field.

Dyslexia...
affects
anywhere
from 5 to 20%
of all people

Dyslexia, a hereditary condition that impairs abilities for reading and spelling, is
one such condition that is known to affect the neurology of the visual system.
Dyslexia is the most widely diagnosed
learning disability among children in
school. According to estimates it affects
anywhere from 5 percent to 20 percent of all people.
Though routine eye exams do not reveal anything especially noteworthy in people with dyslexia, researchers have found that people with this condition process
visual movement and flow in ways that are subtly different from typical readers.

Research shows that some people with dyslexia are
slightly less sensitive to certain types of movement.

Experiments performed by
my lab with James Brockmole
of University of Notre Dame
showed that when pictures
of natural scenes are blurred,
so that they match the visual
response characteristics of the periphery,
college students with dyslexia were able to
learn and remember spatial layouts of scenes.
However, college students without reading impairments were not able to learn the
spatial arrangements in the blurred images.
This study is important because it demonstrates that dyslexia, typically regarded as a
learning disability, may be linked to cogni-

Text

Yet, this insensitivity to motion appears
offset by unusual strengths in processing
information on the peripheral parts of the
visual field that are not used for reading.
We suggest this advantage for peripheral
processing leads to surprising cognitive abilities, including some that may be
important in typographic
design.

issue 7

to sense biological movement
is essential for the survival of
humans as a species, the brain
is evolved to be exquisitely
attuned to the perception of
movement underpinning typographic design. Sensitivity to
movement is not usually measured in routine diagnostic eye
examinations. However, variations in visual sensitivity to movement are sometimes studied in people
who have evident neurological issues, such as brain
injury, neurological disease, or a neurological learning disability. Therefore, much of what we know
about visual sensitivity to movement,
or other higher order cortical visual
functionality, comes from studying
people whose neurology is otherwise
unusual.

31

HOW SENSITIVE ARE YOU
TO ERRORS IN TYPOGRAPHY?
Starting at the second paragraph in this
article, subtle errors in typographic design were deliberately introduced into
every other paragraph. The errors are
barely noticeable to start, but increase
in magnitude in paragraphs on the preceding two pages. At which paragraph
did you first spot that something was
wrong with the layout? If you noticed
the errors in paragraph two, you have
the skills of an experienced typographer. If you hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t noticed until paragraph six, you may be less sensitive to
these types of errors. Research sug-

32gests that people with dyslexia may be
among those who are more sensitive
to such errors compared to others.

tive advantages for memory
and learning. It furthermore
suggests that the neurological
differences in vision associated
with dyslexia may be advantageous in learning the layout of
a scene, a skill that is important
in typographic design.
Another clue suggesting that
dyslexia may be linked to visual talents for typographic
design comes from a study
conducted in my lab investigating whether astrophysicists
with dyslexia have special abilities for noticing subtle undulations
in the shape of a graph.
In collaboration with my colleagues Todd
Rose, Marc Pomplun, and Lincoln Greenhill, we
compared astrophysicists with dyslexia to scientists who are typical readers and measured
their ability to notice a double-peaked pattern
in a spectrum signaling the presence of a black
hole in a faraway galaxy.
We found that when the spectrumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s graphical
shape spanned a large visual angle, the astrophysicists with dyslexia outperformed their

Enhanced abilities to holistically
integrate information across a visual expanse also makes people
with dyslexia especially adept at
noticing errors and inconsistencies in a drawing. For example,
the
artist
M.
C. Escher is well
known for illustrations of
fanciful scenes that appear to violate
the laws of physics: to allow water to
flow uphill, people to walk up walls, or
ants to walk a staircase in a seemingly
endless circle. Escher achieves these effects by incorporating geometric forms
known as “impossible figures.”

To illustrate how dyslexia may influence sensitivity for typography, you may notice that
the text in this paragraph has been subtly
altered so as to introduce errors in font spacing and layout. Some words are expanded
or compressed, and some characters are
shifted slightly above or
below the line. Our work
suggests that individuals
with dyslexia are likely to be
more sensitive to such errors
in design and to nuances in
layout. These differences in
the neurology of vision associated with dyslexia may
contribute to making these
people very well suited to careers in typographic design.
Overall, this demonstrates
that people who otherwise struggle with
reading and other functions, often have visual strengths valuable in fields such as art
and science, that make them important,
valued contributors in these fields.w

Dyslexia...
may be linked
to cognitive
advantages
for memory
and learning

Impossible figures are drawn in such a
way so as to join one part of a figure
with another in ways that would be impossible (without tricks) if the structure were to be actually built.
Catya von Károlyi at Boston College timed how quickly
people with dyslexia were able to identify whether
or not a figure was impossible, and found that those
with dyslexia were faster at making this distinction.
She attributed this to heightened abilities in dyslexia
for global integration that allows these people to more
readily compare parts of the drawing across its whole,
to quickly spot the logical inconsistencies.
Since typography incorporates patterns and regularities that are vestiges of a calligrapher’s flowing hand
(Above) Impossible figure. Image courtesy of Sarah Shuwairi.
(Left) Scientists with dyslexia can more readily spot the doublepeaked pattern in graphs such as these, simulating the spectra
from galaxies containing black holes, when the peaks are
separated by large visual angles.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: The author’s research described here was supported with funds from the
National Science Foundation and a fellowship at the
Smithsonian Institution funded by the George E. Burch
Foundation.
Check the GLIMPSE journal blog for a transcript of
the author discussing his article and the documentary
film, Helvetica, with typographers Dyana Weissman
and David Jonathan Ross from the December 15, 2010
GLIMPSE Art + Science of Seeing Dialogues event at
the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA.

Text

and arm movements, departures from this
expected pattern are often perceived as a
departure from the accepted aesthetic. We
suggest that people with dyslexia, who have
strong abilities for holistic integration, who
are sensitive to errors in visual logic, may have
visual systems that are extremely sensitive to
this aspect of the typographic aesthetic.

issue 7

colleagues in this task. Again,
this suggests people with dyslexia are at an advantage when
it comes to holistically integrating shapes across the whole of
an expanse, using information
from the peripheral parts of the
visual field.

33

The Anatomy of Texture
by Matthew Reed

“ . . . the anatomy of texture, is that which shews the composition
of the organs: it is a kind of analysis, reducing these into their
constituent elements.”
William Lawrence FRS 1829. On the Nature and Classification of Diseases. Lecture III.
October 5th, 1829. Printed in the London Medical Gazette.

T

he word “texture” has been widely
used to describe the anatomy of

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

34

1D-2D-3D

organs in the human body. The

Typesetting, printing and binding a complete physical

phrase, “anatomy of texture,” in

multi-scaled book is a high-level cognitive task in visual

particular, is an elegant and highly appropriate

and geometric construction. A complex book texture

way of describing the complex, three-dimensional

needs to take the stream of words written by the

spatial arrangements of their structure and

author and give those words a physical form.

microstructure. This same phrase can also be
applied in the conceptual exploration of the

Before a book is typeset, the text that was created

textures embodied in the complex internal

by the author is essentially a one-dimensional stream

structure of text in a physical book.

of information; thousands of individual characters are
formed into words, sentences, and paragraphs, using

The word “text” is derived from the Latin word

spaces and specific punctuation marks. If all of these

textus meaning to weave. This word is also the

characters were printed out one after another on a

root of the word “texture.” The connection

long strip of paper, like an old-fashioned ticker tape,

between text and texture is both natural and

we would have a completely linear text. Although not

obvious. When seen from a distance of a meter

ideal, even in this format it would be possible to read

or more, a page of printed text is unreadable but

the text, word by word, as the text was scrolled before

is instantly identifiable by its two-dimensional,

our eyes. For example, the first edition of The Origin

visual, texture. The history of the connection

of Species by Charles Darwin is composed of 155,727

between text and texture goes much deeper than

separate words. In this linear format, if The Origin

two dimensions. In metal type (or letterpress)

of Species was printed in an 11-point font, it would

printing, the text letter forms on paper did not

emerge as a one-dimensional strip about 600 meters

result in just two-dimensional optical textures,

long (Figure 1A).

but tactile, three-dimensional physical textures,
caused by the pressing of inked metal type

This was of course how telegrams used to be constructed
(Figure 1B). This transition from linear to telegram text is a

(b)

(c)

crucial step. The linear text string is mapped
from one-dimension into two-dimensions.

��

In addition to the existing one-dimensional

������ �� �������

relationships between letters, spaces, and
punctuation, this mapping now adds new

�Living birds can hardly fail to
be highly effective
agents in the transportation of
seeds. I could give
many facts showing how frequen
tly birds of many
kinds are blown by gales to vast
distances across
the ocean.

structural features to the text—including
inter-line spacing, and how to end a line.
Telegram paste-up is a crude transitional

issue 7

step towards a fully typeset two-dimensional
page (Figure 1C).

Text

Transposing text into a two-dimensional
visual space is at the heart of book design,
and it is ancient. Robert Bringhurst points

Telegram paste-up
is a crude transitional step
ng birds can hardly fail to be hig
effective agents in the transportat
ion of seeds. I could give many
towards ahlyfully
typeset
two-dimensional page

(Top,Figure 1A) A very small portion of the
linear text version of The Origin of Species.
(Above, Figure 1B) A “telegram” version
of our fragment of The Origin of Species.
(Below, Figure 1C) Telegram paste-up is
a crude transitional step towards a fully
typeset two-dimensional page.

(c)
out that, “scribes and typographers, like
architects, have been shaping visual spaces
for thousands of years.”1 If the complete

��

������ �� �������

linear stream of The Origin of Species is
mapped into a readable two-dimensional
form, it would be about 14 square meters
in area.
The Origin of Species, in the form of twodimensional typeset pages, can now be
turned into a three-dimensional form. It is

�Living birds can hardly fail to
be highly effective
agents in the transportation of
seeds. I could give
many facts showing how frequen
tly birds of many
kinds are blown by gales to vas
t distances across
the ocean.

35

printed onto both sides of a thin paper, then cut and bound to create

Origin of Species

a three-dimensional book with a volume of less than half a liter—about
one US pint. This whole process of typesetting, printing and binding

in 2-dimensions

thus allows a high degree of compaction—it weaves the very long

=

three-dimensional space. All levels of hierarchical structure in the final

sequence of words that comprise a book into a complex, but compact,
physical book serve the purpose of making the text easily available in

~14 square meters

space and time to a human reader.
Designing and typesetting a complete book is a synthetic task. Although
the anatomy of a book is completely man-made, it has a final structure
with a close conceptual similarity to the complex spatial arrangements

Origin of Species

of the tiny functional units of living organs. Whereas the unaided eye is a
sufficiently sharp tool to observe all of the structural elements of a book,
the units of functioning organs can only be observed and quantified

as a 3-dimensional
book

36

=

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

a volume of < .5 liter
or ~1 US pint

using a range of quantitative microscopy tools, and this is an explicitly
analytical task.

The Texture of the neocortex
In many organs—for example, the brain, liver, and kidney—biological
functionality is achieved in nature by the careful and non-random
creation of a 3D structure, which is composed of millions or billions of
tiny functional units distributed through the 3D space of the organ. The
human brain is built in precisely this manner. In particular, the highlyconvoluted layer on the outside of the brain called the neocortex, is
packed with neurons, the brain’s key functional units. The neocortex
manages virtually all of the high-level tasks we identify as human; it is

human cortex

the home of the sensory and motor cortex, the auditory cortex, as well

four lobes

weighs about 600 grams, which is about 40 percent of the weight of the

=
~600 grams,

as our memory and our visual cortex. In a typical adult human, the cortex
whole brain. Within this cortex there are about 15 billion neurons, with
supporting tissues and structures such as blood vessels and glia.
The neocortex has been studied for hundreds of years and

15 billion neurons,

neuroanatomists use a number of hierarchies to describe its structure. At

parallel to the surface of the convolutions of the external surface of the

the crudest level, the neocortex is divided into four lobes, named for the
these lobes the neurons within the neocortex are arranged in six layers,
cortex. At the same time, columns of neurons course through these
six layers and tend to be connected together. Neurons themselves are
tiny—many are only 10 microns in diameter—and they are embedded

in a structured matrix composed of other

of

cell types and tiny blood vessels. The neurons are the

—Text Block—Page—Book. Although the fine

basic computational units of the brain. They require

detail of brain microstructure can only be resolved

information to be passed into them and then back out

using microscopy, for most people with normal

again at high speed.

visual acuity, the unaided eye is sufficiently sharp

magnitude:

Glyph—Word—Line—Paragraph

a tool to zoom in on all the structural elements
All of the hierarchical and multiple levels of structure and

of a book. Although there are analogous textural

texture in organs such as the brain are exposed as the

motifs in printed books and the neocortex of the

organ is inspected with higher and higher magnification

brain, the mode of seeing required to resolve these

microscopy. Here, due to the very small scale of the

motifs is quite distinct.

fundamental units of the brain, microscopy is the tool
we need to zoom in on the structural elements of the

We see more and more detail in our field of view as

organ.

we zoom in on each of the hierarchical components
of a book. However, at each successively higher

In a printed book, the functional units analogous to
neurons are glyphs. These discrete impressions of black
or letters but rather elements of writing—the individual
marks on paper that contribute to meaning. Glyphs are
embedded in plain white space and are the basic units that
construct the hierarchy

of textural components that
make up a book. These welldefined components range
in size over seven orders

fraction of the total book in the field of view.
For our purposes, the seven components can be
approximated as two-dimensional objects, for
which the most robust measure of size is area. In
the case of a physical book, the size of each object
has been estimated in millimeters squared (Figure

Text

ink onto the white space of paper are not characters

magnification, we see a smaller and smaller

issue 7

Anatomy of a book

37

2). Each of the seven components has a distinct
physical extent or size. Note that if any of these
hierarchies were completely left out—for example,
if the book was made of pages that had no
delimited text block and margins—it would have a
detrimental impact on the readability of the book.

Book

(Figure
2) The
h seven
ragrap
Pa
components of a physical book.

Book

Paragraph

108
107
2

108

Word10

Book

Page
Word

2
Area, mm

7
6

10

105

Page

104
103
102
1

xtxt
TeTe
blokck
bloc

Glyph

Glyph

10

Line

106

Area, mm

Page

Book

105

Page

4

10

Paragraph

Text blo3ck

10
102

Paragraph

101

Text b

Line
Word

Glyph

Terminals

Axis
Axis

Ape
Serif

Aperture

Serif

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

38
Utopia
At a magnification where whole paragraphs are
visible, the anatomy of texture of individual words
and the font becomes the dominant feature of a text.
The individual glyphs of the font are clearly visible
and the inherent structure of these glyphs and the
way that they interact with whitespace are the
motifs of texture that delight or annoy the eye. The
construction of lines and paragraphs of text that we
really want to read, and find easy to read, requires
the skills of the typesetter. There are a number of
textural decisions that a typesetter needs to make,
perhaps the most important being selection of the
font that the text will be set in.
The Utopia font shown in detail in Figure 3 is a
transitional style font that was designed by Robert

Slimbach
and first released by Adobe in
1989. Adobe describes this font as combining ”the
vertical stress and pronounced stroke contrast of
18th-century Transitional types like Baskerville and
Walbaum with contemporary innovations in character
shapes and stroke details.” Although the font is not
as widely used as Slimbach’s Minion typeface, it is an
excellent font and is also freely available for aspiring
typesetters in the LaTeX system. Complex scientific
textbooks, complete with mathematics, can easily be
typeset in Utopia. It prints well and reads well even at
small font sizes. Figure 3 also shows some of the key
tricks that master typesetters of old had to achieve by
their acquired skills and which are now created with
clever computer algorithms.

erture
Aperture

issue 7
Text

39
(Figure 3) The Utopia font, by
Robert Slimbach.

Although invented by Chris Messina (an Open Web advocate for Google), hashtags became popular among
mainstream users in 2007 because they allowed users to quickly relay information during an emergency.
In October 2007, tweets about the San Diego fire were shared and made searchable through the hashtag
#sandiegofire; they have since been implemented by users for similar purposes, and now serve as perhaps
the most up-to-date source of information for local, national, and international breaking news—in addition
to rampant updates about the goings-on of celebrities. - Rachel Sapin

#hashtags

I

f you
know about #followfriday,
you probably also know about Twitter’s hashtag craze (or
the # sign as it was long known to keyboards before the advent of the social networking
giant). In addition to being a way for users to convey metadata in an already-compendious tweet,
hashtags allow for a more connected back-and-forth on the site; they help categorize tweets, and also
make them searchable based on the subject of the hashtag. For instance, #followfriday is a hashtag an
individual attaches to a tweet to identify that they are giving the thumbs up to a user or list of users they
are including in a tweet (an example tweet might read: #followfriday @Glimpsejournal). People can then
type “#followfriday” into the Twitter search bar to see a large sample of whom users of the site like to
follow, and possibly expand their own network of users they connect with on the site.

40

Individual Glyphs
If we turn the zoom up even further, then the individual

Conclusion

glyphs that make up a font fill our field of view. Here

In analytical terms, the anatomy of texture of a

the interaction between the glyphs and white space that

physical book is remarkably analogous to that of

creates words and lines is no longer visible. Here we see

a biological organ such as the brain. But whereas

the fine details of the glyphs and the skeleton of the letter

evolution has been the hand at work designing

forms. This level of magnification is illustrated in Figure 4,

the complex three-dimensional structure of a

which shows the Scala font and its closely related sans

working brain, once the text has left the hands

serif. These fonts form part of a large family of typefaces

of the author, the book’s designer, typesetter

created by the Dutch typographer Martin Majoor. In his

and printer are responsible for creating a three-

published philosophy of type, Majoor states that, “In my

dimensional physical artifact. In common with a

opinion, mixing serif with sans only makes sense when

well-functioning brain, a well-functioning book

the serif and the sans typefaces are both derived from the

has enormous complexity and sophistication.

same foundation, or even from the same skeleton.”2

The techniques used by typographers to build

issue 7
Text

41

(Figure 4) the Scala font and its closely related san-serif.
These fonts form part of a large family of typefaces
created by the Dutch typographer Martin Majoor.

the best books are based on thousands of years of human

BIBLIOGRAPHY

experience and are designed to produce a pleasurable
reading experience.
The anatomy of texture produced in the book creation
process gives rise to structures that span seven orders
of magnitude in size. Most books do well to have these
structures exist, but great books, like great brains, need to
ensure that the structures that exist at each of the scales
are highly integrated with all of the other structures. As
Robert Bringhurst puts it, â&#x20AC;&#x153;typography is an art where
the microscopic and macroscopic constantly converge.â&#x20AC;?

Textual landscapes
of the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora
by Christine McCarthy Madsen
photographs by Robert Correia Jr.

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

42

issue 7
Text

43

T

hroughout the Tibetan diaspora, text permeates

Beyond the visible, the reverence for text continues

not only the culture, but the landscape. As

further still—practitioners circumambulate the

the result of thousands of years of respect

library, prayer wheels contain strips of written

and reverence for the written word in all of its

mantras and prayers repeated thousands of

forms and instantiations, text in the form of prayers and

times, and library collections often house small

mantras serve as a quotidian reminder of the importance

shrines as well as texts, blurring the line between

of textual knowledge in the practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

library and temple.
While this sort of deep cultural and spiritual
relationship with text is only beginning to be
studied and understood by Western scholars,
it is apparent and striking in even the shortest
visit to areas of the Tibetan diaspora. The
integration of text into the physical and nonphysical surroundings of practitioners is said to
be a means of integrating prayers into daily life.
Monks and lay people walk past these spiritual
texts routinely. It becomes habit to spin prayer
wheels when passing by them. Each of these
movements and acts is said to bring the textual

44

prayers to life.
While the saturation of texts into one’s
surroundings is thought to be a means of daily
integration, there are also particular activities
that serve to emphasize a special engagement
In Dharamsala, India, and the Boudhanath section of

with text. The act of copying out texts, in

Kathmandu, text is visible everywhere—prayer flags contain

particular, has long been considered a good or

written texts, rocks are carved with prayers and mantras,

meritorious deed, and is indeed tied to some

books are placed on altars, and images in temples often

of the earliest teachings of the Buddha. The

contain scenes of reading and studying.

Lotus Sutra, which is often quoted in Tibetan

skywriting

1

T

he Boy Who Wrote Sutras on the Sky is a centuries-old story of a boy who heard of the great merit that comes from writing out
the Diamond Cutter Sutra. Too poor to afford paper and pen, he eventually writes the Sutra on the sky. “Then, in the space of the
outline that he had fashioned, the rough grass became soft, the flowers had a sweet fragrance, and in neither day nor night was
there frost, hail, wind, or rain—all through the blessing power of writing the holy object.”3
Many Westerners may have been introduced to secular skywriting with the Wicked Witch’s broomstick-in-the-sky scribbling of
“SURRENDER DOROTHY” in The Wizard of Oz, but the first form of airplane skywriting was seen in England, courtesy of John C.
Savage. In 1922, Savage hired Captain Cyril Turner to write “Daily Mail” over England and subsequently, “Hello USA” over New York.
Soon after, the American cigarette maker, Lucky Strike, adopted skywriting for marketing purposes, and the Pepsi-Cola Corporation
followed suit.
Skywriting is typically performed by one plane that can write up to around six characters. It is accomplished by heating low-viscosity
oil to 1500 degrees using the aircraft’s engine exhaust, where the oil is then vaporized, thus creating the plumes of white letters you
see against the blue sky. Typically, the letters are around 1 mile high, take about 1 to 1 and 1/2 minutes to create, usually last about 20
minutes and can be seen for 30 miles. Skytyping is somewhat of an improvement on the skywriting medium. Using an array of planes,
skytyping emits biodegradable vapor puffs in a dot-matrix pattern; an onboard computer controls the sequencing of the vapor that
forms the letters in the sky. - Christine McCarthy Madsen / Rachel Sapin

Buddhism in defense of the worship
of textual scriptures, says:
If a good man or good woman shall
receive and keep, read and recite,
explain or copy in writing a simple
phrase of the Scripture of the
Dharma Blossom . . . that person
is to be looked up to and exalted
by all the worlds, [and] showered
with offerings fit for a Buddha. . . .
Let it be known that that person is
a great bodhisattva.2
So strongly associated are texts and
writing with good deeds that both the
act and the medium are considered
both

economically

important

and

characters of prayers and mantras are
slapped out on the waterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and printing
on the sky are both practiced as well as
being the center of important Tibetan
legends.3 Great value is placed on
learning to read at a young age, and
paper has always been an important
economic commodity. It is not only the
act of copying out a text, but also the
act of commissioning a copy of a text
that holds merit for the actor.
While the act of copying out a text by
hand is laudable,4 the act of printing by
mechanical means has also been considered meritorious. Just as the use of
text is heavily embedded in the culture
and practice of the Tibetan diaspora,
so too is the use of technology; and

one of the first and longest associations of the
diaspora with technology
is through the mechanical
reproduction of texts.

If you recite ten malas7â&#x20AC;&#x201D;a thousand mantrasâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a day,
then when you go to wash in the river or at the beach,
all the water becomes blessed. Because your body is
blessed by the mantra, all the water becomes blessed
as it touches your body, and so the water purifies all the
animals who live in the water, who drink the water, and
those who touch the water.8

I

f in Tibetan Buddhism,
to copy a text is to do

a good deed and to earn
merit, then to automate
the copying of that text is
to do the same, only faster and more efficiently.
This notion often seems
counterintuitive to Westerners who are inclined
to romanticize Tibet as pure and untainted by
modern technologies; but the truth is that Tibet
has long had a love affair with automating the
reproduction of texts. Block printing is known to
have existed in Tibet and China from the 9th or

46 10

th

century, with the first major commissions for

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

larger texts (under the patronage of the Mongols)
in place by the 13th century.5 There is also some
evidence that the Tibetans were using an early
form of moveable type as early as the 13th century
for the mass production of prayer flags.6 By the
end of the 13th and beginning of the 14th centuries, there was the mass printing of the Kanjur

This statement indicates the extreme power imbued within the

and Tenjur (which together compose the Tibetan

recitation of simple prayers or mantras in Tibetan Buddhism.

Buddhist cannon).

It illustrates both the qualities with which these prayers are
infused, but more importantly, the power ascribed to the

This view of how technology has been used to

quantity of repetition. Like with the reproduction of text, if

automate the reproduction of texts illustrates

more mantras means more merit, to automate the recitation

the beginning of an ongoing affinity for

of mantras makes good sense. Prayer flags are one form of

combining technology and text. The next steps

such automation. Prayers are printed onto thin and loosely

in technological automation are closely aligned

woven squares of cloth, which are hung outside. As the wind

with the significance of recitation of prayers

passes through and around the flags, it is said to release the

and mantras in Tibetan Buddhist practice. Like

prayers printed on them into the wind and to bless anyone

writing or copying out the sutras, recitation is
seen as another means of engaging with text that
produces meritorious results.

to deliver more mantras than could be read or
recited manually. Taking the notion of automation

W

hile prayer flags perform the recitation of

one step further, the prayer wheels themselves

a mantra or prayer through wind power,

are frequently automated. Some are turned by

prayer wheels are able to automate the recitation of

water, others by the warmth of a lamp or even a

thousands of mantra in only a few seconds. Prayer

light bulb.

wheels appear as metal cylinders inscribed or painted
with a mantra around the outside and set atop a
dowel or turning mechanism. Inside all of them are

G

iven this long and productive history of
automating the reproduction and recitation

of text, it should come as no surprise, then, that

written or printed hundreds or thousands of times on

the adoption of digital texts in this diaspora has

scrolls of paper wound tightly into the center of the

been so common. If the goal is quantity, then

wheel. The size of the prayer wheels vary from a few

digital media have some tremendous benefits.

atop a handle and contain a weighted lanyard to

provide momentum and to assist in the spinning of
the wheel; they are carried by practitioners who spin

them in a clockwise direction as they walk—also

always clockwise—around a sacred space such as a

temple, monastery, or library. Larger prayer wheels
are affixed to walls, while the largest (several feet

in height) are placed in small rooms by themselves.
These wheels are turned by passing practitioners as
they follow circumambulation trails.

//
:
p
t

Just as prayers are released onto the wind from

ht

flags, mantras inside of prayer wheels are said to be
released through the rotation of the wheel. To spin a
prayer wheel is the equivalent of reciting each of the
mantras written inside. In the words of the Amitabha
Buddha, “anyone who recites the six syllables while
turning the Dharma wheel at the same time is equal
in fortune to the Thousand Buddhas.”10 In this way
the prayer wheel can be seen as a powerful means
of automating the recitation of mantras.
(Far left, above) Large prayer wheel, Macleod Ganj,
offices of the exiled Tibetan government. (Far left, below)
Buddhist practitioners in Dharamsala, India circumambulate the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. (Left)
Circumambulating the library. Photographs courtesy of
Robert Correia Jr.

Early forms of digital media share the same
spinning quality of prayer wheels, even the same
clockwise direction. Taking this to the next step,
rumours abound on the Internet that the Dalia
Lama himself has said that having a digital prayer
wheel—or even just the text of the mantra om
mani padme hum on your spinning hard drive is the
same as using a traditional prayer wheel.11 From
this idea, copious animated GIF files, computer
applets, gadgets, and widgets have appeared
to fulfill the practice of setting text into motion
with the greatest ease. Animated illustrations of
prayer wheels, opened in web browsers will spin
in a clockwise direction.
Some Western practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism
have taken this notion of digital prayer wheels to
an extreme through the manufacture of prayer
wheels filled with DVDs each containing millions
of mantras.12 Each prayer wheel contains 128
DVDs, for a total of over 1.8 trillion prayers.13
While not typical of the Tibetan diaspora, when
viewed in the context of the long affinity of the
Tibetan Buddhists with automating the repetition
and reproduction of texts, the Tibet-Tech™ Prayer
Wheel does not seem incongruous.

The Library of Tibetan Works and
Archives. (Above left) Digitized texts
displayed on a computer moniter,
The Library of Tibetan Works and
Archives. (Left center) Tibetan book,
being used to check against digitized
versions, The Library of Tibetan Works
and Archives. (Below left) A monk
at Shechen monastery in Kathmandu
Nepal transcribes a Tibetan text into the
computer to make it searchable. (Right)
The Library of the Tibetan Works and
Archives contains a small shrine. On the
table in the foreground is a single book
removed from the shelf. Photographs
courtesy of Robert Correia Jr.

issue 7 Text

51

If prayer flags, prayer wheels and printed and

ENDNOTES

carved mantras are all ways of integrating text into

1.

Boudhanath is a section of Northeast Kathmandu that is
famous for its giant stupa. Located on the traditional trade
route from Tibet to the Kathmandu valley, it has been a
pilgrimage site for Tibetan Buddhists since at least 450 BCE,
before Kathmandu was established. It is now home to at least
50 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Boudhanath

2.

Schaeffer, Kurtis. 2009. The Culture of the Book in Tibet. New
York: Columbia University Press: 5.

The earliest known printed book in the world, is in fact a
Buddhist sutra, or teaching. The Diamond Sutra (http://www.
bl.uk/onlinegallery/hightours/diamsutra/) is a central teaching
of Indian Buddhism and was first translated from Sanskrit into
Chinese in about 400 AD. This copy of the Diamond Sutra
was found in the caves of Dunhuang and is the earliest block
print to contain a date: 11 May 868.

daily life, then the adoption of digital technologies
can also be seen as an extension of this principle.
Daily life for many around the world now takes
place in front of a computer, so does it not make
sense for that space to contain these same
integrations? Considered from this perspective,
the leap from stone to paper to digital bits does
not seem inconsistent and may provide a reason
for the early adoption and widespread uptake
of digitized texts in this field. Projects to digitize
Tibetan texts are now widespread throughout the
field of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies.14 w

Palmieri, Richard P. “Tibetan Xylography and the Question
of Movable Type,” Technology and Culture 32: 82-90.
This article by Palmieri looks at the case of three blocks
for printing lungta (prayer flags) that used a set of
interchangeable “keys” for setting in alternate texts. Palmieri
argues that this was an early form of combining wood block
printing with moveable type.

7.

A mala is a string of beads (usually 108) used, like a Catholic
Rosary, for reciting and counting prayers. To recite a mala,
therefore, means to say a prayer or mantra for each of the
beads in the mala. To recite ten malas is simply to do this ten
times.

10. Ladner and Zopa, Wheel: vii.
11. This quote appears on a number of web sites, http://www.
dharma-haven.org/tibetan/digital-wheels.htm but could
not be substantiated in any of the Dalia Lama’s writings or
teachings.
12. “Digital Prayer Wheels” accessed October 6, 2010, http://
www.dharma-haven.org/tibetan/digital-wheels.htm
13. Retrieved from: http://www.earthsanctuary.org/
sacredSpacesPrayerWheel.php
14. The most well known Tibetan digitization project is currently
being made into a documentary film, Digital Dharma: http://
www.digitaldharma.com/

GLIMPSE journal: In your project, “Negated
News: Histories’ Ransom Notes,” you have created/extracted “sub-narratives” from existing
newspaper texts. They have both layers and
holes. Do the holes in the white paper appear
where words were discarded?

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

62

Megan Michalak: Yes. These “drawings” address
the performativity of historiography by reversing
the editing process critical to the creation of a
historical narrative. This performance unearths
embedded discontinuities, exposing differing
accounts of the same event. In terms of process, I
use a subtractive method of progressively removing
information—the holes that you mentioned.
So here the meaning mutates solely by shifting
where the hole, or historian’s gap, appears in the
article. Going back to your question, the holes are
the most important structuring device in these
drawings; as they create a new story from the same
information without adding or reordering the data
that is there.
Gj: So do you see this work of pulling out
alternative stories as analogous, or counter, to the
journalist’s construction/omission of history/ies?
MM: I see it as completely analogous to any editing
process, whether it’s film or writing. The structure of
the drawings themselves exposes how the editing
process influences meaning. Something akin to
the “exploded-view drawing” in architecture,
that shows the intended order of assembly of the
fragments that create the whole. If you were to
superimpose the afterimages together, you will
find the original document in its entirety. So these
afterimages/facsimiles, form a counter-narrative
to the positive transcription; as they embody
that which is omitted from the record. Together,
the encoded and negated transcriptions create a
contemporary palimpsest.
Gj: You have made mention in your writings
about the idea of recording as erasing. Could
you talk about that a bit?

MM: Yes, the editing function within writing always mediates
the said and the unsaid. This becomes more complicated
when you look at economies of storage in historical archives,
as constraints of storage determine what makes it into the
contents of the archive itself. This point is most obvious
when looking at the form of the palimpsest, where in order
for writing to occur an old record would have to be scraped
off and reused. In this way cultural production is often tied
to erasure. This destruction happened mostly because of
the scarcity of material, which brings us back to this idea of
storage again.
The irony is that hundreds of years later we are able to
detect and re-image these negated, written-over accounts.
One of the most striking examples of this is the Novgorod
Codex. What is unusual about this particular codex is that
some of the records overtly refer to heretical subjects that are
excluded from the records of the Church. Which brings us to
the really juicy question of what determines the parameters
of the contents of an archive, and the criteria for what is
excluded, and omitted from it? This question relates to
Walter Benjamin’s concept of the written record as the history
of the victors, which is not without its taint of barbarism.1 So,
going back to your original question, from this perspective
of Benjamin, the constellations of holes within the drawings
become the apertures through which meaning is exhumed.
Gj: So you’ve chosen to cut out these words in a way
that brings the criticality of retrospection to the present
moment—to create hyperconsciousness in the viewer
that there are, in fact, holes in the original, contemporary
text?
MM: Right. I’m interested in taking a contemporary
document and performing a reverse archeology of that
artifact as it represents the present historical moment.
The drawings, through performing this reversal, create a
forced distance in the sense that they are deeply forensic,
and make something that is familiar into something slightly
uncanny. This uncanniness comes from viewing the present
as archeology, which brings about narratives of extinction,
exhaustion, a projected future of science fiction, etc. To
heighten this uncanniness, I also deliberately picked texts
that bear witness to some of the outrageous excesses of the
present, such as the Blackwater Hearings, or the auctioning
off of Che Guevara’s hair.

Gj: When you read any text, you can approach it from
several perspectives. There are layers of meaning,
conceptually, with any written text. Does your visual,
visceral reaction to the text have layers of visual meaning
too? Not just the content of what you read, but do you
see text as a texture, possibly letter forms, on the page?

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

64

MM: I’m approaching the whole project in a way where the
meaning is algorithmic and related to code or pattern. I
view it more orally and musically, than visually. While these
works are drawings, they are also intended to be musical
scores. The holes are rests, or silence, but also the empty
space on the page, and the words are like notes. The way
it’s orchestrated on the page relates to rhythm. I decided to
create drawings that look like a player piano scroll or punch
card system—again to heighten this idea that within the
positive transmission there are also omissions, which relates
to the storage of knowledge in binary code. From this idea
of binary code I wanted to take the power of the negative
transcription and use this idea of negation as a political
strategy.
Gj: That’s interesting. Have you thought about doing an
audio component to the project?
MM: Yes. That’s the ultimate intention for it in its final form.
It’s visual because our conception of truth is related to
having proximity to an original signifying event, or a physical
referent that is visual. So, culturally we have this bias of truth
being tied to visuality as proof. Somehow there is no better
cultural artifact of this illusory proximity to truth through
visuality than the newspaper. Coincidentally, a few years
after I had started this project, the New Museum in New
York curated an exhibition called “The Last Newspaper.”
Perhaps this also signifies something peculiar about the
present moment and sounding the tombstone to print
media, and a wave of nostalgia for this form?
At any rate, while right now my project exists as a drawing
series, I have plans in the works to create an installation with
digital media that would create an auditory score where this
material would be narrated. The experience will be more
cinematic and like a strange encounter with one’s own
culture projected into the future.

Some of the larger questions I have been thinking
about in realizing this project as an installation,
are how we have turned history itself into a
commodity that is consumed, and the outsourcing
of historical memory to corporations that store
and lease this material. What I mean by this is
the disturbing aspects of intellectual property
and copyright laws, where massive stock footage
houses, such as Corbis and Reuters own the
production rights to the images that constitute
historical memory itself. While the images may be
in the public domain, there is only access to them
through corporation-owned copies.
Coincidentally, around the time I was researching
this, there was a criminal investigation regarding
the CIA Torture Tape Scandal. This raised all kinds
of ethical questions about the withholding of and
destruction of information, as the Enron Audit
did back in 2002. With the confluence of all these
events, I began to wonder if it was possible to coopt these strategies and use the act of negation
as a political counter-strategy. Right now, the
international storm surrounding WikiLeaks and
Cablegate, to me, really embodies the power of
the negative transcription. This information being
released into the public domain threatens to
further destabilize many of the faltering systems
that we have been scrambling to put Band-Aids®
on.
Gj: So, negation as a reaction to dominant
political forces?
MM: Well, partially the project was spawned
after maybe year seven of the second Bush
administration. So, this was a response of outrage.
If documents can be falsified, or intelligence
gathered to justify these means that are totally
questionable, as with the second invasion of Iraq,
then why can’t citizens co-opt these same tactics
and use them for counter purposes? In relation to
the work, I started thinking about this negation
of the official record as a defiant act, and how
different marginalized groups have developed
tactics that are more or less intended to arrest the

historical record and insert a populous that’s been omitted.
In some ways I began to view these acts as attempts to
hold the master narratives hostage, and insert a fugue of
“minor histories.” In some ways the aesthetic of this work
indirectly mirrors these concerns and is a citizen’s ransom
note, hijacking the media, or holding the record itself
hostage, and channeling through the gaps all the subliminal
messages.
Gj: The newspaper is interesting too, because it’s a fixed
historical record, but the material of it is also ephemeral.
Newspapers are intended to be disposable.
MM: Yes. That’s actually the eureka moment that occurred
when I decided to use the newspaper as material. I suddenly
realized that while I don’t have the rights to most of this
stock footage material owned by corporate archives, there
is this cultural ready-made that functions in a similar way
that is a mass-produced record that is completely accessible
and I can hold in my hands!
Gj: Why is memory such an important theme in your work,

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

In terms of the laboriousness, I suppose it is the
application of how I work sculpturally to other
registers of media, conceptually with writing,
to drawing and image manipulation. At first it
was very liberating to apply these sculptural
procedures to drawing and text, but then I
realized that this laboriousness was incredibly
demanding in different ways. I wasn’t destroying
my back making sculpture, but I was possibly
giving myself Carpal Tunnel Syndrome with an
X-ACTO® blade and pencil!

of text an effective way of discussing it?

MM: I worked at a post-production house before I started
teaching in the Visual Studies Department at the University
at Buffalo. I would spend my days looking through archives of
films and photographs. It was completely fascinating, in the
way that this material was so performative and was its own
form of visual anthropology. So, in many ways, this is where
this preoccupation came from. I also began this series in late
2007 when I relocated to Buffalo; context is everything, so
perhaps I unintentionally ended up channeling the ghosts of
Buffalo’s structuralist film and digital poetics histories in this
work, since it is very tied to the Cut-Up aesthetic.2

/

Gj: One of the things that really struck me about this
work, initially, was the laboriousness of it on every level:
intellectually, conceptually, physically, with your X-ACTO®
blade. This is really intriguing when we’re talking about
the present moment, and how unengaged physically,
viscerally and intellectually we are in our culture. Do
you have any thoughts on that? The anachronism of this
process? The labor on every level?

MM: It has something to do with being a citizen,
but we are in this moment where we are detached
from the luxuries of citizenship that are desperately
fought for in other parts of the world. I consider it
a way of activating these rights of citizenship and
not taking them for granted. Also the narratives
that are constructed are a method for trying to
comprehend subjects that we are desensitized to.
I guess in many ways they are acts not only of
defiance, but also acts of stretching my capacity
to engage and empathize.

Gj: You quote Derrida: “There is no political
power without control of the archive, if
not of memory...[and democracy requires]
participation in and the access to the archive,
its constitution, and its interpretation.”3 Do you
consider your role, or the artist’s role in general,
to be inherently political?
MM: It’s hard to elaborate without going into my
personal beliefs, but we’re innately social creatures,
and I think that an artist’s responsibility as a social
being is to reflect and comment on the historical
moment that we’re part of. That becomes political.
People have argued this for a long time in the arts,
but there’s not really an apolitical place to stand.
That place of ultimate transcendence that art is
supposed to bring is always political because that
vision of a transcendent position is influenced by
wealth and power and taste and the question
of what is “good” taste. That’s supposed to be
transparent, but I think it’s innately political. It’s
hard for me to extract art from the political.

Gj: This project would be different if it were
taking WWII newspapers and doing the same
thing, because of hindsight. That would be
interesting in and of itself, but the charge of
this work comes from…
MM: I don’t think you could do it, though,
because presently we don’t know the outcomes
of anything, so it’s pure speculation. If you take
WWII, we know the outcomes and so I don’t know
if it would work.
Gj: So do you think these will function differently
for the viewer 20, 30, 40 years in the future
because it would be similar to as if we were
now looking back on these works if they had
been articles from World War II?

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

68

MM: They could be a time capsule, like the Voyager
Interstellar Record, or as William Burroughs said about the
relationship of the Cut-Up method to divination, “When you
cut into the present the future leaks out.”4
Gj: Is an objective history impossible?
MM: I guess that question’s related to the sciences. Is there
such a thing as absolute truth? Is there an object without
a subject? No one knows. But history is made from human
intervention, and there’s always a subjective position from
which it’s written, which is related to the existing power
structure that forms it. w

Gj: Do you think they’ll still be successful
decades in the future, but in a different way?

MM: Beyond the scope of it being certain
articles? The other part of what the project is
about is realizing how we have turned history
itself into a commodity by digitizing everything.
I think that’s unique to the present: this drive to
digitize and archive everything and put it online!
People say our era may end up becoming the
new Dark Ages because in the future no one will
have an operating system to maintain all of our
digital records. It is conceivable that in 20 years
our cultural stored knowledge will look like these
drawings, in the sense that the information will
degrade, bit rot being the moth in the digital
archive.

/

Gj: Your mediation of the articles, though,
creates a record in and of itself that is different
than that of the newspaper, and that may or
may not be transparent to a reader in the

If quantitative differences are to be expressed via text –
such as the names of cities distinguished according to

When placing labels inside a map, decisions

their population – then manipulating font size is the most

have to be made regarding three key issues:

effective method. Changes in color value (like the difference

text content, text design, and text placement.

between a light, medium, or dark red font color) are to a

Text content refers to choosing which objects

certain extent useful as well, but require fairly large font

are to be expressed in text form, followed by a

size and a limited number of variations in order to be easily

definition of the actual string of characters to be

recognizable. Saturation and texture density can meanwhile

used. Text design involves making choices among

safely be ignored as possible variables when using realistic

such text variables as font type, spacing, size and

font sizes.

Researchers have...ranked location/
position above all other visual variables
Qualitative differences among map entities can be

inherent in the data. For example, note how easy

expressed as well, most notably through variations in font

it is to detect linear relationships, clustering, and

shape and color hue. The former is exemplified by the use

outliers from a simple scatter plot.

of multiple font types in a single map, such as Arial and
The problem with using it actively as a

fonts from different font families with each other, such as

manipulable semiotic variable in geographic

serif and sans serif fonts, as this can easily disturb the overall

mapping is that location itself – and such related

aesthetic of the map.

concepts as proximity, connectivity, or flow –
tends to be the very subject that we are trying
to understand via maps. If spatial patterns are

binary differences. Sometimes these differences can be

what we are studying, then we will want to be

purely qualitative, such as when they’re used to distinguish

cautious about introducing our own patterns

between land features and water features. This is one case

just for purposes of visualization. Location is in

where a distinction of roman and italic font styles is both

fact something to which cartographers extend a

useful and subtle. At other times, certain features are meant

great reverence. When preprocessing our chosen

to be explicitly set apart from others, such as when the

point, line, or area geometries and then attaching

names of capital cities are capitalized – which seems fitting

symbols to them, cartographers tend to be

enough – or expressed in bold text, while other cities are

quite conscientious about preserving locational

not. This typically binary use of boldness might be more

information as much as the map’s scale, purpose,

a reflection of what has been actually available in the text

density and distribution of geographic objects

design portions of common software packages, as compared

allow. The very concepts of point, line, and area

to the possibilities pointed to by Bertin (Figure 1).

are a reflection of the attempt to generate a
computable representation that is aligned with

So far, this paper has managed to ignore the semiotic

a cognitively meaningful categorization of real-

variable that is by far the most powerful in a perceptual and

world entities.

cognitive sense: location. Humans have evolved to be very
good at spotting patterns based on location. Accordingly,

Here, though, is the problem: while we can

location is featured prominently within Gestalt psychology,

adapt our conceptualization of entities to fit

where it drives such organizing principles as proximity,

a particular situation – such as cities being

symmetry, connectedness, or closure. Researchers have also

represented alternatively as points or areas–the

consistently ranked location/position above all other visual

fundamental nature of text itself is dictated to us

variables, when it comes to the ability to convey patterns

and unchanged, no matter whether it is attached

Text

Interestingly, text affords special means for expressing

issue 7

Times. One typically has to be cautious though when mixing

71

the labeling of the Atlantic...
swings handsomely across the
full height of the map

computer science community. All this
doesn’t even address the fact that in realworld applications, the label position has
to be coordinated not only within a single
map layer (e.g., the label expressing
the name of a country should be clearly
associated with the respective area symbol
for the country, typically inside of it), but
across multiple layers (e.g., country names

to a point, line, or area object. Text is always

should not interfere with other symbols and labels for cities,

linear in terms of its original representation,

highways, and rivers).

with its length being just a direct function of the
number of characters (or syllables or whatever

(Figure 2, above) Portion
of a map of the Atlantic
Ocean with extensive
labeling of geographic
features.6
(Figure 3, below) Use
of text as indicator of
geographic distribution
of grain production in
Austria. Weizen=wheat,
Roggen=rye, Hafer=oats,
Gerste=barley, Mais=corn.7

(Figure 4, above). Two Wordle visualizations of the content
of this paper. Note the use of the semiotic variables size,
orientation, and location, with the latter two only serving a
space-filling function.

(Figure 4). Note how the semiotic variable size is correctly

(Figure 5, right page, to be viewed at 90 degrees counterclockwise). Use of dedicated GIS software for automatic
placement of several thousand labels in a visualization based
on the music folksonomy of last.fm (courtesy of Biberstine,
Börner, Duhon, Hardy, and Skupin).

with any meaning at all, apart from being manipulated in

and consistently used in both outputs. Meanwhile, the
variables location and orientation have not been imbued
random fashion in the interest of filling the display space.
For a very different approach to text mapping, consider the
visualization derived from the last.fm music folksonomy seen

Today, true advances in the use of text in mapping

in Figure 5. Here, more than one million user-tagged items

depend on a simultaneous consideration of the

were mapped in two dimensions according to the similarity

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

74 look and possible function of text, informed by the

of tag texts. The resulting model is represented in five

role of space in cognition and visualization. This

layers, beginning with the top-dominant term in each map

can lead to improved use of text in cartographic

region, followed by the second-most dominant term, and so

maps, and also to interesting new mappings

forth. This is an example for a mapping of text that takes the

derived from text data. Unfortunately, we find

power of space seriously – including use of a supercomputer

plenty of examples where the role of space as

to project extremely high-dimensional text data into two

organizing principle and the power of location as

dimensions – and connects with traditions passed down

semiotic variable are ignored or abused. Keep in

by generations of cartographers,5 via a labeling solution

mind that, to the human observer faced with a

computed for almost 40,000 area objects using Maplex

display, distance matters, connectivity matters,

software.

clustering matters, and even gaps matter, as they
all are involved in giving meaning to space.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that text is one of the most
revealing elements of visualization, laying bare much of the

(Figure 7, above). Depiction of a portion
of Southern Africa in Google Maps.

this geographic region. For example, in
1925 the Portuguese colonial powers
changed the name of the Angolan
settlement of Huambo to Nova Lisboa.
The 1932 edition reflects this change
by using Nova Lisboa as primary label
and Huambo as secondary label. By
1960, 35 years after the name change,
Nova Lisboa appears as the sole label.
Newly independent Angola renamed
the town back to Huambo and this is
correctly reflected in the 2005 atlas
edition. Then, in the 2009 edition,
something odd happens, with Nova
Lisboa reappearing as secondary label.
This, however, has nothing to do with
any actual changes on the ground.
Instead, one has to know that 2009
marks the first edition of the atlas
to be largely produced using GIS

(geographic information systems) software and

to have available, and it is also certainly about more than

digital geographic databases. Changes include

creating something that is good enough.

a larger map scale; though, contrary to intuition,
there are overall less settlements depicted in this

A map is supposed to be an organic whole, a carefully

geographic region. Another change is the use of

orchestrated arrangement of geographic data, blending

a digital gazetteer that apparently includes Nova

cartographic

Lisboa as a secondary name for Huambo, and

of the mapmaker. The result is a product that can be

also indicates Jadotville as a secondary name for

very useful and that can impart lasting esthetic value.

Likasi. There are no reasons to ascribe any sinister

Choosing the content, design, and placement of text is a

motives to these name interchanges, as even the

crucial element of that process, whether one is creating a

U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) does in

printed map or a highly interactive visualization system.

fact list Nova Lisboa as a “variant” of Huambo.

Wordles, despite their shortcomings, have demonstrated

However, the fact remains that in this atlas

the

product some colonial place names give a repeat

manipulation of text can generate. Let’s build on that, as

performance several decades after their on-the-

we design artifacts that incorporate text in a manner that

ground and on-the-map disappearance. The

prevents grumpy cartographers from having to decry “the

main question here is not whether these colonial

poor skill or bad taste displayed in the lettering.” w

genuine

tradition

with

excitement

the

that

creative

imagination

purposeful

semiotic

this was based on thoughtful deliberation on a
case-by-case basis, weighing the geographic
facts as it were, or whether label content was
blindly fed from a digital database.

ENDNOTES
1.

Johnson, J. B. 1885. A manual for the theory and practice of
topographical surveying by means of the transit and stadia.
New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Uncritical reliance of map creators on the wisdom
of digital geographic databases is a worrying trend
that is only made worse when heterogeneous
data sources are blindly mashed up. Google Maps
provides fine examples for the dangers of the
latter approach. Note the heterogeneity of labels
in Google Maps’ depiction of the same region
in southern Africa (Figure 7). According to this
map, Angola is virtually void of any settlements
and only Zambia uses a numerical system of road
naming.
Sure, Google Maps is interactive, comes with an
API (application programming interface), and –
here comes the all-powerful argument – it is free
to use. However, cartography is about much more
than putting data on a map that one happens

n 19th-century America, the ability of young men
to write with a clear hand was important for success in business. In the middle decades of the
century, entrepreneurs, including William H. Pratt,
established schools in major urban areas to teach
writing skills to a generation of clerks in the pretypewriter era. He was also a masterful penmanship teacher and designed this portrait of
Abraham Lincoln using the text of the
Emancipation Proclamation.

GLIMPSE www.glimpsejournal.com

78

William H. Pratt of Davenport
was active in Davenport scientific
circles and submitted articles
to the Academy of Natural Sciences. The 1860 city directory
listed Joseph C. Lopez and Pratt
as the proprietors of the Davenport Commercial College.
Since Pratt is listed in the
1867 directory simply as a
“teacher of penmanship,”
it is likely that the College
did not survive the economic
stresses and dislocations of
the Civil War. Not many young
men were available to learn accounting procedures or a careful
clerical hand. The Proclamation of
Emancipation and a similar piece
featuring a portrait of George
Washington crafted of the text of
the Declaration of Independence
would have been great advertisements for his skills as a
master calligrapher and
teacher of penmanship.
Portraits of
Abraham Lincoln fulfilled a
national need for
images of the nation’s leader during the

Civil War. This masterful calligraphic portrait
turns superb penmanship into a recognizable
portrait of the president. This print was probably published after Lincoln’s assassination.
The lithographer, Augustus Hageboeck was
active as a commercial printer in Davenport, Iowa, from 1861 into the 1880s.
At times, Augustus worked with
his brother John. They printed city views, railroad stock
certificates, and labels for
customers in the region.
This is an unusual print
for them or any other
lithographic
printer
or
engraver.
The
American Antiquarian
Society has a fine collection of penmanship books as well
as some examples
of the calligraphic
art in its manuscript and graphic
arts collections. w
Further reading
William E. Henning, An Elegant Hand: The
Golden Age of American Penmanship and
Calligraphy. New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll
Press, 2002.
Explore the AAS website
www.americanantiquarian.org
(Right) Proclamation of
Emancipation. Abraham
Lincoln. Davenport, Iowa:
Lithograph by A.
Hageboeck, 1865.
Copyrighted by W.
H. Pratt. Courtesy
of the American
Antiquarian Society.